Suicide Awareness Week

This, it seems, was International Suicide Awareness Week. Although I was vaguely aware that it existed, I was pleased to discover the other day that there were actual events here marking it - film shows, and today, a religious service for people touched by suicide - which I went to. While I've not been especially close to anyone who has ended their life, I have known quite a few people who have - I guess it isn't really possible to spend a significant period of your life in association with the mental health system, and not do so...

On the way in, everyone was handed paper flowers, which you were invited to write messages on the back of and place them on a 'meadow' at the front, at a given point in the meeting. I wrote, "Thank you, God, for foiling all my attempts" on mine - without which, I almost certainly wouldn't be here to tell such a tale today. In the prayers I tried to think of all those I'd known who were not so fortunate and to my annoyance, I could only think of two. I know there are at least eight - and probably more. And I thought of that sunny day - I don't really know how many years ago now - when I was out walking near my home in Hotwells, Bristol, when it slowly dawned on me what those firemen I could see over there on the mud banks of the River Avon were up to, fishing with their ropes - in a hole, under the Clifton Suspension Bridge...

Poems were read about departed friends - people the reader had spent time in hospital with; and even as I write, one or two missing faces are springing into my mind - people who were nice to me, talked to me, made and fetched cups of tea for me - when I was young, confused and lost in a world of my own.

In days gone by, I've sat upon the parapet of that bridge myself, even been carried off it by several policemen on occasion. I've been found wandering in a semi conscious, drugged and drunken state in near darkness in the Welsh mountains more than once; and I've sat in that same railway cutting close to Stratheden Hospital in Fife as the remains of one of my contemporaries were recovered from, some months later. I don't know why I've been saved so many times and against so many odds - but I'm so glad I was - so thankful.

If there's one thing that convinces me personally of the existence of God - then that's probably it - for I eventually reached the conclusion that I could try to end my life as much as I wanted - he just wasn't going to let it happen, for he has plans for me! I'm still not entirely clear what all of these are, but it makes some sort of sense - to me, anyway.

And you know, of spiritual warfare - well, I used to discount that as a product of over zealous Christians with too much time on their hands. I took the view that the devil existed only where minds had been exercised in his favour. But several times now, that view has been challenged as good things have occurred in my life - it happened several times just after I'd made my decision to become a soldier of the Salvation Army - and in fact it's been vaguely around these past few days too - just fleeting thoughts that seem to want to urge me to leap from a lofty place, or suchlike. Such thoughts may be understandable to a degree when one is depressed; but when they occur when things are going well, there can only be one conclusion. They're being put there, deliberately!

Of course, you have to be careful not to describe these things in too much detail to doctors...!!